Preserving the Digital World

J. Willard Marriott Library. Digital Preservation. www.lib.utah.edu

Preserving digital materials can be extremely difficult. After all, digital materials face a number of threats. Unlike physical materials, digital materials rely on (among other things) a purely digital interface in order to be accessible and useful. So what happens when these "environments" become obsolete? How many of us have floppy disks sitting in cardboard boxes today, with nothing capable of actually reading them? This is the problem faced by digital preservationists, and it is a problem digital historians must face as well. As Wikipedia aptly states: "The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time." Making sure documents, videos, and other digital media are viable in the future is of utmost importance for future research possibilities.

Science Daily's article "'Digital Dark Age' May Doom Some Data" brings up a good point: with software advancing so rapidly, there is a lot of important content getting left behind, and the problem is only going to get worse. One prime example the article gives NASA's Viking mission to Mars in 1976. Today, a portion of the data gathered from the mission is "unreadable and lost forever." Something as historically important as the Viking mission should not be lost to the sands of time - and this is just one example!

Digital preservation is also important for a number of reasons besides historical significance. Digital Preservation Europe (DPE) has a list of reasons digital preservation is necessary, including legal (business records required by law, for example) and financial reasons (to prove intellectual property and secure profit from such property). Conrad De Aenlle believes that there will be a growing need for professional preservationists in the future, and I tend to agree with him. The numerous benefits of preserving digital materials far out-weigh the cost of hiring professionals and maintaining software, hardware, etc.

The research group known as FANG (Finding Aids Next Generation) took it upon themselves to not only preserve historical documents via digital medium, but also make it accessible and useful to researchers. The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections was born from their effort. Magia Ghetu Krause and Elizabeth Yakel explain here that the project aimed to discover if "social navigation tools" could streamline the accessibility and usefulness of a digital archive. Users could set up personal accounts on the site and interact with each other as well as with the site itself with by posting comments. FANG discovered that their users were very helpful in spotting mistakes and helping to make corrections. Krause and Yakel write that they were "encouraged" by the project's outcome. However, when I visited the site I was not thoroughly impressed. After browsing through (at random) Edwin L. Arkins diary and scrapbook I found the site to be a bit clunky and not very useful. The images of the diary were illegible and there was no text version to make any sense of it. Also, to get to the images I followed two or three links after the main search query. And, to top it off, when I tried to return to my search results an error message appeared.

Regardless of the accessibility issues of the Polar Bear project, FANG has the right idea. It takes a lot of work to come up with a way of dealing with the particularly infinite problems faced by digital preservationists. However, this is no excuse to give up and go home. Digital preservation is frustrating, but necessary. With continued experimentation and creativity, preservationists will find solutions and protect our delicate digital materials for generations to come.

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Old Bailey and Computing

From the Bench. SentenceSpeak. sentencespeak.blogspot.com

Computing in the digital world has changed a lot over the years. Susan Hockey's "The History of Humanities Computing" takes readers on a trip through time from 1949 to the 2000s, showing the progress of programming and digitizing in the field of humanities. Hockey describes the painstaking research and labor that went into such projects as Fr. Busa's Index Thomisticus. Busa, who fortunately found sponsorship through IBM in 1949, was able to create a program that allowed users to search for words and phrases within St. Thomas Aquinas' many texts. Later, in the mid-1970s, the Oxford Text Archive (OTA) debuted. Hockey explains the goal of the OTA as follows: "The OTA undertook to maintain electronic texts and ... to make these texts available to anyone else who wanted to use them for academic purposes." They essentially created a "digital library" that is open to researchers interested in linguistics or literary topics. Of course, the most obvious advancement of the 90s was the Internet and World Wide Web. It goes without saying the impact this has had on research. Up to present, Hockey does not mention any huge, ground-breaking projects, but does believe that because the Internet is being used more widely by historians, there will be many further discoveries to make and a richer discourse for historians to work with.

A wonderful example of a more recent project is the Old Bailey Online. Created by the universities of Hertfordshire and Sheffield, the Old Bailey Online took "The Proceedings of the Old Bailey" - a __ century account of criminal court records - and created a searchable online database. As Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker (who both served as project directors) point out in  "Digitising History From Below: The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674-1834", the Old Bailey Online is a great research tool because you can search for whole strings of words and compile useful statistics to support research. However, they also warn scholars not to overlook other resources, reminding us to look deeper into the contexts of the general information gleaned from the Old Bailey. In other words, the Old Bailey Online is a great starting point for research, but any serious scholar should rely on multiple source to get a better idea of the historical significance of the material. Similarly, Ancarett uses believes in the research possibilities of the Old Bailey, and uses the site to teach students a little about how to extrapolate statistics from historical data, and introduce "math-phobic" history students to numbers.

Dan Cohen, and a cohort of other researchers compiled Data Mining with Criminal Intent, utilizing the Old Baily Online (exclusively) as their research tool. Though they made some minor statistical discoveries (women accused of bigamy suffered less severe punishments than men as time progressed, according to the Old Bailey data), the Criminal Intent project simply reinforces Hitchcock and Shoemaker's point, that the Old Bailey Online is just one tool in a sea of other useful tools that should not be used exclusively if there is anything truly useful to be discovered. As computing in the humanities continues to progress, existing programs such as the Old Bailey will continue to improve, but, as always, researchers must consult other sources to more accurately assess historical contexts.

The Blake-Ahlquist-Woolcott House

Blake-Ahlquist-Woolcott House. Historic Preservation Office. www.historicspokane.org

The Blake-Ahlquist-Woolcott House
1232 North Summit Boulevard, Spokane, WA
Private Residence

The house before you is the Blake-Ahlquist-Woolcott House (or just the “Woolcott House,” for short) which was built by an unknown architect in 1902 for Jacob M. Blake, an attorney at the Blake and Adams firm. Blake was the son of a noteworthy judge, Richard B. Blake, who served in the superior court of Spokane county and Stevens county districts. (Judge Blake was known for being “faultless in honor, fearless in conduct and stainless in reputation,” according to History of the City of Spokane and Spokane County, Washington, by Nelson Wayne Durham.)

The Woolcott House is typical of Craftsman Style with its low pitched roof, shingled siding, artisan crafted details, and use of local materials, like basalt. After the house was bought by Dr. Tory Maurice Ahlquist in 1912, a second story was added in 1917, and then a carriage house was also built on the property in 1919. Both of these additions maintained the Craftsman Style.

Dr. Ahlquist was a surgeon who was born in Sweden, and raised in Nebraska. During World War II, Dr. Ahlquist helped recruit young doctors to assist in the war effort. He was recognized for his efforts with a certificate of commendation from President Harry S. Truman, and a selective service board medal.

The last of the house’s namesakes, Bloys and Marie Frances Woolcott, moved-in in 1949. Marie was an accomplished Washingtonian woman. Graduated from Wenatchee High School, she went on to study interior design at the University of Washington and Columbia University. She became a member of the Business and Professional Women’s Organization and served as the organizations president in 1941 and 1942. Her most renowned accomplishment, however, was her involvement in selling war bonds during World War II. She managed to band together 3000 women who raised 97 million dollars towards the war effort. Marie and Bloys resided at the Woolcott House until 2001 when Marie passed away at the age of 93.

The Richardson House

Richardson House. Historic Preservation Office. www.historicspokane.org

Richardson House
1226 North Summit Boulevard, Spokane, WA
Private Residence

Charles Prentice Richardson, a successful gold miner originally from Illinois, had this American Foursquare Style home built in 1906.  The American Foursquare Style is typified by the many horizontal lines and a very low pitched roof, as well as the simple box shape of the Richardson House. 

Charles Richardson struck gold after buying the Moose Creek Placer Mine in Idaho. Charles, his wife Frances, and their two daughters Annice and Katherine, toiled at the mine together until they decided to move to the city in 1906. With the hard earned wealth that came from the gold, they were able to hire the renowned architect William Wallace Hyslop to build their house on Summit Boulevard. W. W. Hyslop designed several well-known Spokane buildings including the Folsom House at 528 E. 14th Ave, and the Marlboro Apartments at 180 S. Cannon St., as well as many others. W. W. Hyslop was originally from Minnesota, but became a well-respected architect in Spokane because his designs were “particularly innovative in style, quality, and durability” according to HistoricSpokane.org.

The Richardsons didn’t stay put for long. Just two years after their house was built, the family moved to Oregon. The house then passed through several owners, some of whom altered the appearance to suit their needs. The most outstanding addition came in 1912 with a carriage house built behind the house. The owners at the time, Charles and Ninah Jackson, owned the Jackson & Walter Real Estate Company. The two structures, though built by different architects, complement each other in style. The carriage house (which is now used as a garage) features the same attractive horizontal lines and low roof as the main house.